Speaking of travel—the ship you traveled in, how did you manage to build it? “Oh, we found it lying around,” Pav said, a lighter moment that seemed to play well with the reporters. He went on to reveal that Adventure had indeed been “found,” that it had been built by the Sentries “a really long time ago” and then refurbished.
Can it take off again?
“Once it’s refueled,” Pav said. Taj wasn’t so sure about that, unless Adventure was powered by a truly exotic motor; no chemical rocket known to human physics could be that small (and carry that little fuel) and still reach escape velocity.
But Taj had no idea what kind of rocket motor Adventure possessed. Or, come to think of it, what cargo it carried.
Nor did he expect to learn the answers here. What troubled him was that he was not sure he would learn the answers from his son, not without considerable effort.
The questions to Yahvi troubled Taj with their triviality—it was like listening to paparazzi chasing a pop star back in the early 2000s—but his mild disgust soon gave way to outrage when he heard his granddaughter’s answers. Sexually active! At age fourteen!
Now he was eager to know more about life in the human habitat on Keanu. It sounded like some libertine fantasy, free of all standards of decency.
His face no doubt showing his displeasure, Taj caught Pav’s eye and saw only passive acceptance.
His posture must have stiffened, because he felt Tea’s hands on his shoulders. “Steady, Grandpa,” she whispered.
“Did you hear that?”
She slid into the chair next to him. “Yes, terrible stuff,” she said. “The questions—”
“The answers.”
Tea looked amused. “I realize this is something I should probably have told you on our wedding night, but I was sexually active at the same age. In Nebraska, USA.”
“And your point is?”
“Their life”—she nodded to Rachel, Pav, Yahvi, and Xavier at the other end of the room—“has been incredibly difficult. Remember what that place was like when we left. Imagine what it was like when a hundred and eighty-seven very unhappy people got dumped there.
“They had nothing! They were on a different planet! They had to make it up as they went along! It’s a miracle they didn’t just starve in the first month. They made a home in an alien environment! They kicked out the Reivers—”
“And sent them here.”
“I don’t think they sent them, darling. And now look,” she said. “They came back here to help us! Six of them against a hundred million Reivers and quite a few humans who want to do them harm.
“And you’re upset that teenagers fuck? Come on, Taj.”
All he could do at that point was hope that his silence served as an apology, and turned back to the reporters.
There were almost no questions for Xavier. He was asked what he missed most and snapped, “Sunsets, I guess,” which discouraged additional queries.
Finally one reporter dared to ask the question Kateel had wanted. “What can you tell us about the Revenants? Do people die on Keanu, then come back to life?”
Pav said, “No—” But Rachel swiftly intervened, placing her hand on Pav’s arm. “That is a very complex subject,” she said. “And a press conference isn’t really the best place to discuss it. Let’s save that for another day, when we’ve had more time to adjust and be helpful with our answers.”
There was some grumbling. Clearly Kateel wasn’t the only one who wanted to learn the secrets of life beyond death.
But not today. The press conference ended; Mrs. Remilla took charge of getting the reporters out of the hospital.
And Taj, feeling suddenly every year of his age, was left looking at his son, his daughter-in-law, his granddaughter, and Mr. Toutant . . . wondering what they had become.
National technical means are no longer available to us: The last Indian-built imaging surveillance satellite, RISAT-5, was launched in 2021 and ran out of maneuvering fuel a decade later.
Commercial platforms such as OrbImage and GeoEye have been inaccessible to nations outside the Free Nation sphere and are reportedly no longer functional. (There have been no commercial imaging launches since the Aggregates consolidated their control of Free Nation U.S. in 2023.)
To be blunt, we lack overhead capability.
Combined with travel restrictions and information firewalls, our only sources of intelligence are the so-called undernet, and inferences that can be made from economic studies.
Leading to this conclusion: Free Nation U.S. is in the midst of a construction project that dwarfs the Apollo program and, indeed, compares to the buildup of American nuclear forces (missiles, warheads, aircraft, naval vessels) in the period 1946–1992.
And the center of this construction is a facility located in northern Arizona, an area formerly known as the Arizona Strip.
The purpose of this project is still unknown.
INTELLIGENCE REPORT, RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS WING,
DELHI, 25 MARCH 2040
WHIT
“First trip east?”
Whit Murray blinked at the voice, which belonged to a man a few years older than him—possibly twenty-five. He was tall, thin, with reddish blond hair and beard. A ginger, his mother might have said.
Whit had memories of two stops after his middle-of-the-night arrival, when the train had largely been empty. Where had all these people come from? And who was this strange man next to him? “Yeah.”
And why did the guy have a deck of cards in his hand?
The man’s voice was surprisingly rich and deep. “Any idea what you’re in for?”
“No. Just, something related to my work.”
“Which was—?” The man opened his hand and began to slide cards from palm to fingers.
Whit made a face. He was blinking, hoping his eyes would begin to water. “You don’t look like a member of THE,” he said.
The man laughed. “I’m the last fucking person to be in THE.” He pronounced it “Thee” with a long E rather than the preferred “T-H-E,” which didn’t make Whit any more comfortable. “I am notoriously indiscreet.” Freezing his cards in his right hand, he held out his left. “Randall Dehm.”
Awkwardly, they shook. “So, Randall, how long have you been working on . . . whatever it is you’re working on, including that business with cards?”
“The cards? Since I was eight, right after . . . things changed and it wasn’t so easy to play games on the Web or watch TV. Something to do.”
“How many tricks have you mastered?” Whit realized he was looking past Dehm as he spoke, taking his first look at the others in the car . . . which itself looked and smelled brand-new. Everyone seemed to be Whit’s age—under twenty, certainly, and in a couple of cases, much younger.
All equally dazed, too.
“Exactly eight,” Dehm said. “The Count, Do as I Do, Cutting to Aces—”
“They’ve got names.”
Whit was unable to hide the sarcasm. Dehm smiled. “I’ve been on this project since I was twenty, seven years ago. They . . . recruited me midway through college.” He smiled. “The cards, even longer. On my own.”
“Oh, a college guy.” Whit was immediately jealous. He’d had the grades and test scores for college, but no opportunity. The days of Pell grants and scholarships—the things that allowed his dad to go to UNLV, according to Mom—were long gone. The Aggregates preferred to take “promising young minds” and “channel them.” “Where were you studying?”
“Caltech.”
That made it even worse. Not only was Caltech where all the best technical people went—okay, maybe MIT—but it was in Los Angeles. Whit had always wanted to go to Los Angeles.
He had always wanted to go anywhere besides Las Vegas.
He realized, in fact, that this train trip to wherever might be h
is third, possibly his second trip across a state line!
Whit’s earlier assignment, programming field calculations for a giant generator, had kept him within Las Vegas city limits, at the former Nellis Air Force Base. (There were still some U.S. military craft there, but no airmen or pilots that Whit and his team were ever allowed to meet. Of course, the giant electrified fence between the Installation and the rest of the base might have had something to do with it.)
The new one was far outside the city, outside the state, in fact. Whit had grabbed his gear from the dorm and hoofed it back to the metro stop in order to catch the oh-dark-thirty bus to the Henderson node.
There he found a special train heading east . . . past Hoover Dam (which he could see from the window, since he happened to be sitting on the right-hand side of the car), then into the trackless waste of northwestern Arizona.
Well, not trackless . . . this train had tracks, new ones to Whit’s untrained eye.
Dehm squinted past him. “Oh, check this out.”
No sooner were the words out of Dehm’s mouth than the train turned to the left, and Whit was looking out his window at the most fabulous structure he had ever seen in his life.
Far in the distance, sitting on the high desert under a cobalt-blue desert sky, was some kind of termite mound ten stories tall, rising like an ogre’s castle on the north rim of a canyon. It was actually a city in one huge structure—an arcology, to use a term Whit remembered from his reading—but not necessarily a human one. There was no obvious activity, no aircraft or trucks going in and out . . . no ads, no personal touches . . . no color.
Just a squat, intimidating dun-colored structure taking up a huge amount of space and looking as though it had stood for a thousand years.
Detracting from the ancient temple image, however, were two visible rows of slablike power towers—no lines, just the towers themselves—stretching across the landscape from Hoover Dam and nuke plants elsewhere in Arizona, Utah, and California like monoliths.
Surrounding those structures . . . a series of giant flat mirrors on pedestals, all pointing at a common center.
The whole thing looked like Disney World conceived by, say, Attila the Hun.
“How far away are we?” Whit asked.
“Half an hour at least,” Dehm said, which meant the mound was even larger than Whit had thought. “We have to go through a couple of tunnels first.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this. We’re going to live there?”
“And work there. That’s not all . . . the whole top of that canyon, the side away from us . . . Well, just wait. And get used to it, too.” Then, with no apparent concern that he might be overheard—and Whit could see that two girls and a boy in the next seat were listening—Dehm added, “It’ll be the last home you’ll ever know.”
Whit was so alarmed that he forgot to be cautious. “What are you talking about?” He didn’t really believe this Dehm guy, but why would he say something like that?
“This project is entering its final phase,” Dehm said. “That’s why they gave the senior people—like me—one last vacation. To say good-bye.”
“And that’s what they told you.”
“Of course not. They just gave everybody in my section leave at the same time, which had never happened before. But there is a sense of completion and finality.” Dehm smiled and proudly, stupidly displayed four jacks.
“So what? Then it’s on to the next project, right?”
“See, that’s just it.” And here Dehm managed to lower his voice and glance over his shoulder. The eavesdroppers sat back, though to Whit their eyes remained wide and their ears remained tuned. “What I heard a while ago was that this particular project was kind of a terminal one, that when the Aggregates hit the on button, it would leave the facility and maybe North America and possibly even the entire world pretty much dead.”
The train entered a tunnel.
Whit found himself feeling frightened—he wasn’t sure why. He had never been afraid of the dark. And it wasn’t Dehm’s story, because he wasn’t sure he believed it, especially since it had all the signs of some weird THE loyalty test.
Maybe it was the sudden reality of separation from the life he knew . . . the sense that he was moving into a new world.
They emerged into harsh desert light. Blinking, Whit turned away from the window and focused on his fellow passengers.
He had seen earlier that they were mostly his age, about evenly split between guys and girls. Dehm, in fact, who was in his own world for the moment, fumbling with his cards, was the oldest person in the car.
One thing they all had in common . . . they all seemed to be alone. No pairs or groups.
And every one of them wore the same look that Whit did: wide-eyed, unreasoning fear.
The train plunged into another tunnel.
QUESTION: For Yahvi Stewart-Radhakrishnan, what’s it like growing up on a Near-Earth Object?
YAHVI: I don’t know how to answer that. I grew up, I guess.
QUESTION: How do you spend your time?
YAHVI: I go to school and work at my jobs, what else?
QUESTION: Would you like to go shopping?
YAHVI: Is that what teenagers do on Earth?
QUESTION: Some of them.
YAHVI: Then sure, I suppose.
QUESTION: Would you say that growing up on Keanu is different from growing up on Earth?
YAHVI: How would I know? I just got here.
YAHVI, FIRST INTERVIEW
YAHVI
“Why can’t I see Zeds?”
Yahvi caught up to her mother after the boring conversation in the meeting room.
“He’s in a pressure chamber.”
“I heard. So why can’t I see him?”
The family stretched across the half-lit hallway, Yahvi on the left, Rachel in the middle, Pav on the right. As she frequently did in conversations like this, Rachel turned to Pav, as if to say, Listen to your silly daughter.
Which always infuriated Yahvi. “Mom!”
Rachel opened her mouth to tell Yahvi why not, then closed it. “Actually, there is no good reason. Let’s see about Sanjay, then make sure Zeds is okay.”
Yahvi never wanted to come to Earth at all. Leave Keanu someday? Sure, if she lived until the NEO reached a destination. But she wasn’t holding her breath for that; even with all the enhancements her parents and Harley Drake and Sasha Blaine kept talking about—extending the human life span to hundreds of “years”—well, it still wouldn’t be good enough.
Yahvi was ready to admit that having Earth as a target was an improvement over the Architect home world. Earth was a few years distant, at Keanu’s rate of travel.
The Architect home world? Something like five thousand years.
“Humans just aren’t suited for travel between the stars,” Sasha would always say.
“What is it we are suited for?” That question came from Nick Barton-Menon, who was the most complete smart-ass in Yahvi’s year at school . . . and as cute as he was smart.
The trouble was, he knew it. The double trouble was, everyone tolerated it. Even Sasha Blaine, the giant red-haired goddess of a mathematician, would put up with snarky comments from Nick that would have gotten Yahvi or anyone else sent to the fields for “readjustment.”
“Humans are great at starting wars,” she would say. (This was not a onetime exchange.) “Lying, cheating, quarreling, poisoning our environments.”
“Go, humans!” one of the others said.
“So we’re essentially like the Reivers,” Nick would say. “Only larger and less able to disassemble ourselves and survive.”
“Those are just our bad traits, some of which turn out to be useful. As in dealing with the Reivers.” Yahvi had never seen a Reiver; none of the yavaki had. They had been exterminated on Keanu before she
was born.
Or so everyone said. Obviously, given the terrifying things they heard about these creatures, their varying shapes and sizes, their insane ability to duplicate themselves, their ability to destroy—that is, reshape to their own needs—anything they touched, every human on Keanu hoped they were gone. Every now and then some yavak, or even one of the older HBs, would report a sighting in some tunnel or one of the other habitats (the Skyphoi habitat was notorious for these events), and there would be a lockdown and panic. Even Nick Barton-Menon would pay attention then.
The problem was . . . apparently a whole bunch of Reiver Aggregates had escaped from Keanu. They had made their way to Earth.
Which was surely bad for Earth, but Yahvi had a difficult time imagining the place, even having seen it looming in the Adventure view screen for four days . . . and after walking its surface for several hours.
Of course, she had been limited to the sights and sounds of an Indian Air Force base, and one particular building—hardly a representative sample, as Sasha Blaine would say. But even then, she was ready to conclude that while Earth might be a perfectly fine place for those born there and condemned to live their lives there, it seemed too limited, too confined.
For example, Keanu moved. It was going places.
Earth moved, too, of course. In a steady rigid orbit around one sun, the same thing it had been doing for four and a half billion years, and, with luck, for another two or three. That was just striking Yahvi as not much fun.
Of course, it probably reflected her anger at having come close to death . . . and her frustration at being cooped up in this awful hospital away from whatever fun Earth had to offer.
She was more frustrated that she and her parents, and for that matter, Xavier and Zeds, weren’t allowed to see Sanjay Bhat, or even to know for sure if he still lived.
Yahvi, Rachel, and Pav went upstairs to the entrance to the intensive care unit only to find Indian Air Force guards and this Wing Commander Kaushal blocking their way. “Your companion is in no condition for visitors,” the round little counselor told them. There were no nurses or doctors around, no one who might listen to an appeal.
Heaven’s Fall Page 8
